Forthcoming in Antipode 47:4 this September, and available online now, Amanda Huron’s “Working with Strangers in Saturated Space: Reclaiming and Maintaining the Urban Commons” is the latest of a growing number of papers in the journal on the commons – or, as Amanda puts it, “ways to envision new worlds”.

One strand of commons research, she tells us, focuses on the local scale, on small groups in “traditional”, mostly rural societies; this research asks how commons are maintained over time. Another strand focuses on the commons at a global scale; this is political research that asks how commons can be reclaimed from a capitalist landscape. In her Antipode paper, Amanda bridges these two approaches by theorising the commons as reclaimed and maintained in the context of the city, through examining the experiences of limited-equity housing cooperatives in Washington, DC. She argues that the urban commons is marked by two distinct traits: it emerges in space that is “saturated” with people, competing uses, and financial investment; and it is constituted by the collective work of strangers. And as the challenges of reclaiming and maintaining an urban commons are substantial, so the need for them is urgent.